This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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Here’s Who Should Watch ‘The Cobbler’
“The Cobbler,” the recently released movie directed by Tom McCarthy starring Adam Sandler as (obviously, Jewish) cobbler Max Simkin, who discovers a stitching machine with magical powers in his basement, has received dismal reviews — 7% on Rotten Tomatoes and a whopping 5.7 out of 10 rating on Internet Movie Database. Oh well, you might…
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The Women Who Would Be (Carole) King
On the last day of the second coldest February in Chicago’s history, I made my way downtown to the Actors’ Equity Building on Randolph Street to gate-crash the auditions for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” If you’ve never been to an audition of this kind, you’d probably expect something out of the movies: a bare…
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What Was a Nice Jewish Girl Like Her Doing in a Church Like This?
At the border of the town where I grew up there is a circle that straddles Maryland and the District of Columbia and is ringed by a band of churches. Catholic, Protestant, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist. All are represented here, I remember being told many times. Many of the girls in my town wore the Catholic…
The Latest
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Of Ben and Jerry’s, Maple Syrup, Bernie Sanders and 8 Other Things About Jewish Vermont
1) 5,285 Jews live in Vermont. 2) The interior of the so-called Lost Shul of Burlington (better known as the Chai Adam synagogue) was painted in 1910 by Ben Zion Black and is currently in the process of being restored. 3) In 1977, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened the first Ben & Jerry’s Homemade…
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How Man Ray Drew on Math, Shakespeare — and Shoah
From 1934 to 1935, at Paris’s Institut Henri Poincaré, surrealist artist Man Ray photographed dusty mathematical models, which he said he found baffling. But the Philadelphia native, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, had to abandon the photos when he fled the Nazis for Hollywood. In 1946, he returned to Paris and retrieved the photos; two years later,…
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New Director of Jewish Book Council Announced
Naomi Firestone-Teeter will be the new director of the Jewish Book Council, the Forward has learned. Firestone-Teeter, previously the associate director of the organization, will take over from Carolyn Starman Hessel, who led the Jewish Book Council for more than 20 years. “She will do a wonderful job,” Hessel said of Firestone-Teeter. “She’s been exemplary…
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Sure, Jesus Was Son of God. But How Was His Fiction?
● Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi By Amy-Jill Levine HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99 When we were children, many of us (especially those of us in yeshivot) were taught to abominate the Christian Scriptures; they were precursors to 2,000 years of Jew hatred. At the very least, it was suggested…
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‘Dig’ Is Too Shallow by Far
(JTA) — Last summer, in the midst of the Gaza conflict, the threat of rocket fire forced NBC Universal’s “Dig” to stop production in Jerusalem and move out of the country. If only the show itself were half that dramatic. Instead, “Dig,” which premiered Thursday on the USA Network, is a rather flat amalgam of…
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A Tale of Two Netanyahus, One Play and One Speech
About a third of the way into “A Happy End” — Iddo Netanyahu’s play about a Jewish physicist’s family that naively chooses to remain in Berlin in the 1930’s — there’s a brief discussion about the impossibility of simultaneity. Young Hans Erdman reveals to his parents, Mark and Leah Erdman, that his anti-Semitic high school…
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The Novel France Can’t Put Down Depicts Muslim Future — Or Does It?
● Soumission By Michel Houellebecq French and European Publications Inc, 320 pages, $49.95 Though it pretends to be about France’s near future, Michel Houellebecq’s controversial “Soumission” is also about its recent past. Set in the year 2022, the novel portrays a country riven by conflicting ideologies and worldviews, teetering on the edge of civil war….
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How Growing Up Jewish Taught Me To Love Hip-Hop
On February 25, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company premiered “This Is Modern Art,” a new play for its Young Audiences series. Kevin Coval, a poet and author and the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, co-wrote it with playwright Idris Goodwin. The play took as its inspiration a 2010 incident when…
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